The Icon and the Axe

by James Billington

  1. me 1 urn ? juciui x nvugru

  The furious„ reaction of Nicholas I to the revolutionary events of

  48-9 further crystallae‹rtEe~sSmT^social

  thinners camTtcnEeelwM^iefrustrated Western hopes for social reforrrl""

  ???~????31^^^^^^^?^??^2^^^? ^^n|^threie~were ??????^ and^exiled) and the^dispatching of Russian troops to help put down the KossuffiTebellion in Hungary^^trrmn^e~A^H!^fT849-were followed"" by a crude effo^Jo^ill_o^jth£intellectual ferment of the "remarkable de6a3e/' No more than three hundred students were to be enrolled in a university at one time. Philosophy was banned from the curriculum, and all public merujrojofJ^linskyTnanTe^was ????????? Letters signed "all my love" aeifc£ensored foxthehnpligd denial^ of affection 5-G^lMidlBg[l^T' and thgjnusical compositions of an astonished Rubinstein were confiscated as he returjjeiLlttfflP^

  notesiinight be_a secret revolutionary code.

  Lacking as yet the "escape valve" of large-scale emigration to America that was draining off so many of the revolutionary intellectuals of Central Europe, the ^Russian intellectuals compensated themselves with the _vague and appeahngjd^ajIilrR^

  kinooiT^merica in the making. GlorifilSioTrtiftne communal peasant

  forms of organization among the~Sravs~was thus corribmed wiTSTEe*political

  ideal of a loose, democratic federalism. Bakunin proposed atteTTHe* llav

  Congress of 1848 in Prague the ideal of a revolutionary federation of Slavic

  peoples opposed to the "knouto-Germanic" rule of central authority. A

  friend of Herzen wrote a verse play praising the "socialist" William Penn,

  and spoke of America as the "natural ally" of a regenerated Russia.21

  Herzen believed that the Padfib^JceanjsQuld become the "Mediterranean

  Sea oTthe future," which Russia and. America would jointly Duua.'!! Kussian

  radwSs_fc]lowed_with romantic fascination the Jiajf^understood develop-

  ments injjje^d^tant^ja^tmejinv^advance"

  resembled the Russianj^astward advance in so manyjespects: and the semi-anarchistic criticism of all existing political authorities which was to become commonplace in Russian radical social thought was rarely extended to America.

  Saltykov spoke retrospectively of the Petrashevtsy as a group which wanted "to read without knowing the alphabet, to walk without knowing how to stand upright."23 Yet its strivings inside Russia and the prophetic reflections of Herzen and Bakunin outside reflect the turn in mid-century Russian thinking from philosophic to social thought: from Hamlet to Don Quixote, to use the terminology of Turgenev's famous essay of the late fifties. In order for the brooding Hamlet to become the chivalric Don Quixote-to leave his castle and set forth into the countryside-there had

  to be an ideal to serve. TMs^j.deal was the vision of a coming golden age in which there would be no more serfdom, bureaucracy, private property, or oppressive_central authority. In its place menwould ???^?~???????1??1 Christianity, build socialism on the model of the peasant commune, and live under a lapse federal system vaguely like that of distant America. These themes were to be developed more explicitly and fully during the reign of Alexander II, and particularly in the populist movement; but all of them are already present in this initial turn to social thought in the late Nicholaevan period.

  More than any other single event, the Crimean War opened Russia up-for a moreseriQijsand widespread discussion of social issues. Indeed, of all thef leitmotivs of modern Russian history, few are more striking than the unsettling influence of great wars on Russian thought and culture. Just as the" schism in the Church was an outgrowth of the first northern war and Peter's reforms of the second, just as the agitation of the late years of Alexander I's reign and the Decembrist uprising grew out of the Napoleonic invasion, so did the great wars of the late nineteenth and the twentieth century have a profound ancl unsettling~tnffiact on Russian .cultural development. The Turkish1 waf Of the"rriid-seventieswas followed by the movements of revolutionary populism inside Russia; the Japanese war of 1904-5, by the Revolution of 1905; and the First World War, by the revolutions of 1917. War invariably put new strains on the outmoded social and economic system and aTthe^sameJS^exposeQ^^trssKtrrthinkel'S ? the methods and ideas of

  the outsig

  The Crimean War appears as a watershed in Russian history. Resounding defeaTon Kussian soil shattered"! hn ???1?|????????1?????"? of ?cr7-olaevan Russia and left a legacy of national bitterness as well as an incentive'' f6Finnovation_and reform. The failure of Russia's traditional allies, Austria

  and Prussjau. to comejtoJier affidiscteffitejjlhrae'SoBtmefu; forced Russia to look to the victorious liberal nations of tBe

  fdisiSrfeSecfttescr^

  Vest, France

  and England, for techniques and ideas. Russia embarked Hesitantly but ir- / reversibly on the path toward m3ustrialization and the redefinition of its ' social structure. No one realized better than the admirers of Nicholas' rule what defeat in the Crimea meant for Russia. Even before the war was irrevocably lost, Thitchev saw in it "the birthpangs of a new world."24 Pogodin summoned up the fire symbol with a strange mixture of apocalypticism and masochism that was to become characteristic of the new nationalism:

  ?

  Burn with your burning fire which the English have lighted in hell, burn … all our political relations with Europe! Let everything be burned with fire! Qui perd gagne!25

  "ii iu rMEVV SHORES

  1. The Turn to

  3

  °f a^e^materiaUigns of change in post-Crimean Russia, none was moretangibleand lnescaplEETEanTSrbnflaingaf ranroads7Noth!rIglp7e~ad to t^ro^ncg?so"girectly anTSamaticluh^^

  in thejnaE5g'"as' tEeTorward ??^?^?????? |gS^^^-CQ^g^^rtgBr^TBqrmterior of Russia in the sixties and seventies." / The gM^mpdmg,^rTroSaToTRu^ia hadj^en ini8i2 (as they wereltiif ? t0 be in 1941) a form o£defense against heayjahTequip^ed invadersfaom the

  L WesS-JSLa,ggurre^~pctoreiquelppeal to the romantic inW^rmH^

  Radishchev, for all his reforming zeal, had been charmed by the oldToad used on his famous trip from St. Petersburg to Moscow; and Gogol had made them symbols of the beauty and mystery of Old Russia.

  The new railroads were to become symbols gf modern Russia with its interrejatsd^rocess of spiritual destructionlnTrnaterial progress" At first

  into Russian culture. Fedor Chizhov, the son of a priest and a close friend of Gogol, Ivanov, and Khomiakov, lectured in physics and mathematics at St. Petersburg and published in 1837, at the age of 26, an anthology giving a history and description of steam machines. He wrote that "the railroad is for me the slogan of our time," and his resolve to lead Russia into the railroad age was undampened by a long period of arrest for allegedly fostering discontent among the Slavs of the Hapsburg empire during the late years of Nicholas' reign. When railroad building began in earnest under Alexander II',?ni?!10v became consumed with a passionate desire to prevemlorelgners

  fro£f2fifr0^

  this newfoliroT^oweTTKr^in i860 formed a company

  which had as its first project the penitential building of a railroad from Moscow to the Monastery of the Holy Trinity and St. Sergius. But he was soon outstripped by his Anglo-French rivals and died disillusioned in 1877, to be buried near Gogol.26 The sense of^conf^joji_an£bitoriiessJsward the' railr°^ds^is_reflected in the speech whichjhe rectoToTthe RjgaTheoTogiFaT

  bridge:"-~-

  Conflicting thoughts rise up in the soul when looking on a new route like this. What is it going to bring us? . . . Will it not be in part the expediter of that would-be civilization, which under the guise of a false all-humanity and a common brotherhood of all . . . destroys . . . true humanity, true brotherhood?27

  Not only tradi^naMsts but Westernizing reformers found themselves

  brooding over these baibingersjof a.new hraTa^eT^lth^^

  fesscd admiration for railroads""and loved to watch them~being~built, the

  "reality" from which he rebelled assumed the shape of a steam^eg
g

  "iron"Tnonster with'

  that belched forth "smoke and tongues

  of fire." The more moderate Westernizer, Prince^iazemsky, haTwritten in. 1847 in his "Review of Our Literature in the Decade since Pushkin":

  Railroads have already annihilated, and in time shall ^eornjletely^

  anruhuateTairpTeylou^mother

  steaffisTfave already long ago put out the fire of the winged horse, whose weighted hoof has cut off the life-giving flow that has quenched the thirst of so many gracious and poetic generations.28

  In the novels of the age of Alexander II, the earth-bound Pegasus of Russian realism found itself repeatedly crossing railroad tracks. It is in a railroad coach that Dostoevsky's„CluisJb.figureJ Prince Myshkin, returns to Russia at the beginning of the Idiot and first meets the dark and venal figure with whom his fajsJjgcomes so sjjar^ely^iatomi amp;gd. Just as the peasants likened the railroads to the spinning of a giant spider web over the Russian land, so Dostoevsky's Idiot sees in them the fallen star Wormwood spoken of in the Book of Revelation (8:11). Turgenev's Smoke sees in the billows of the steam engines transporting Russians back and forth to the West an image of their confused state of mind and the obscurity surrounding Russia's future. The early leader and guiding force in the movement toward programmatic realism in music, Mily Balakirev, worked as a porter in a railroad station in St. Petersburg in the 1870's as his form of penitential "movement to the people." Tolstoy died in an obscure railroad station, and his great novel Anna Karenina beginsanO ends Willi a Iranian being~crushed_ under_a train? ine ????????????? coinecTthe tenrT^King Hunger" (Jsar Gpjgrf)Jn^a poem he wrote in 1865, "The Railroad."

  ATthesame time, railroads became a symbol"ol light and nope to those who drejimSnmmariry of drjimlSLmatexial transformations. The "Tidingl of Zioi?sect of the 1840's had seen the millennium in terms of a new civilization to be built along a vast Eurasian railway whose stations were to serve as giant distribution centers of material benefits. Il'in, the founder of the sect, died in Solovetsk in 1890, just a year before his vision began to be realized through jhe building of the Trans-SiberiarTnulway, which was to become and remaJrrtEeTon"gest in me world, Lenin's arrival at toe Finland stationj2£J5t. Petersburg_in_a sealed train in""Xpruot''?9jy"was a key

  moment of charisma in the development of BoishevJaSTTroj sione^forensic forays into the countryside in his famed armored

  "FaTrymg" amieSrsupportfor the

  ?1???"???? importanTand dramatic roli

  Revolution, and the vast and pretentiously adorned stations of the Moscow subway became symbols of the new civicreligion of the Stalin era.

  's impas- Hm

  V. ON TO NEW SHORES

  The first Russian railroad had been a short line from St. Petersburg to

  Tsarskoe Selo in 1835. Sixteenjears later. Moscow was joined by rail with

  St. Petersburg, thanks largely to the American engineer^ George Washfogton _

  Whistler (the nusbandof James Whistler's famous mother), who helped

  standardizein R"ussia.a" track gauge broader_jhau-the accepted European _

  norm By 185b, tKe"fTrst year of Alexander's reign, construction was under

  way on two new stations in St. Petersburg for lines leading to the west and

  east; construction accelerated rapidly under the new tsar. French Saint-

  Simonians, who financed much of this program, were fascinated by the

  parallel extension of railroads across America and Russia ("these two

  Hercules in their cradles"), considering the Russian expansion less impres-

  sive technically, but far more important TnstoricaJryinits linking of Europe

  wth^iZ^T^ie~RTbsiarrprog7anrwas "arTopeTaBonwithout ????11????"???"

  continent," destined to '^Iace~^poTn1caldTvmoni~wTEK" a" new jwonomic

  community^Jhjit will unite Eastern and WestarrTEurope, and become "like

  Russia itself . . . ???????????????????'29™"*~~"~~~-

  Tot Russia, the newTajEoaaTrJroBglit the first massive intrusion of

  mechanical force into thetoieIess,l^egeTatttg^vwl(^gi ruralJRussia, anda

  greaTincrease in ?????????? class mobility throughout the empire. The '

  firsFtxiiffini^J?!^momgnl.1^

  of departure from native surroundings-probably for a lifetime in the army

  or'the urban work force.. The ride was long and cold; and he was demed~the"*~ use of toilet facilities during brief station stops and then beaten for "offensive conduct" if caught relieving himself on or near the tracks.

  Railroads nevertheless became_a symbol of progress to the new »^^ateriali^ticaria^egalitarian stu^rentsjjT^the sixties, who generally enjoyed"" ?^7????*^?1?1????????1 rides. One of the most gifted young technologisTToT* thTs generation, Nicholas KiBalchich, came eagerly to St. Petersburg in order to study the engineering subjects that would equip him to participate in the railroad-building program, declaring:

  For Russia railroads are everything. This is the most necessary, most

  vital problem of our time. Covering Russia by sections with an inter

  connected network of railroads such as exists for example in England,

  we shall prosper and blossom forth [with] unheard-of progress . . . num

  berless factories;_____

  f~ Civilization will go rapidly fofwafa,""arid we--true, not all at"once^""--%

  will overtake the rich and advanced nations of Western Europe.30,.---

  Yet within a few years this apostle of progress and railroad building ???1 become a full-time revolutionary r whose talents were completely absorbed in

  – the body of Tsar Alexander II himself. This sense of lost opportunity was given "added poignancy by the fact that he devoTeoThls last days in prison priorTo hls~rlanging_to designing _a_flying machine, which he felt was destin^to^siuDpJanttiie railroad as a bearer ofmajerjaJ__progrgss. To under-stand~why this giftedyouth became an apostle and technician of assassination, one must turn to the disturbed reign of Alexander II and the psychology of the new revolutionary generation.

  Under Alexander the dilemma of the reforming despot was lifted to the

  level of highkony as the virus of social thniign't"negnntri~mfer^ wirier

  ckcleT^i^flbtejpopTnation!' "

  DSFTnFTeign"'of Alexander JLJhat of Alexander II lasted almost

  exactly a quarter of a cenluPLandcan be roughly divided ialalwrt hakteg^-a

  period of reform and one of reaction. The period of expectation and reform

  is generally referred to as "the sixties" even though it ran from 1856 to

  1866. The periojLfifreaction followed the first attejn£t_onthelife_ of the _

  Tsar in i866_and las^3ZjmBriii!e^-sggeCTStul assassination~of i88iTlinlike

  Alexander I, Alexander Ilach^lyprornuhjgtedaseries of profound re

  forms: freeing the serfsTTnstituting trial by jury, and creating zemstvos for

  liffliteTTloc^^The

  most important cultural and in1gflectulu"TIewlopm5it ofTneage was done outside of, and in opposition to, him and his court. Moreover, the period of most passionate rejection of official ideology occurred during the "sixties," the^perjod oJLgreatest liberalization; whereas the ?61111?????? affirmatioaa of the alienated intellectuals occurred _during the period of gpvernmenjgj reaction in the seventies.

  Clearly the concerns of the thinking class were developing their own^ inde^end^nTdyn^mlcTTo understand it one musFconsider the psychology of the self-conscious, "new men of the sixties." This ic^oclastic^stud^e^ts^ generation effected in a few short years one of the~rnostthorough and far^J reaching rejections of past tradition in the history orrn^d^rrj^Eu^peTOut of this fermSTTfKsia produced in the later years of Alexander's reign a number of disturbing new ideologies of which the most important and original was theVpopulist movement, ^o central was this movement to the cultural accomplishments and aspu^ohs~oTthe'period that it is_more correct to sFpa^l^lJ^_r:T1ll1'''~^S thiil" Sjj age of Alexander II.

 
; This newjgagrjition had been brought up in the harsh last years_pf Nicholas3"reign and had come to"stuorv in ^t"~1*etersbTirg amidst the grgaL. exftectafjo^Jar^elorniitiaLprevailed under JSeSajadjErJhev looked to the new regime with some of the optimism with which the reform-minded aristocracy a half century earlier had greeted the coming of Alexander I after the death of Paul But the new reformers lacked the broad aristocratic

  1. l ?? ??? iv k»vwi

  perspectives of earljer_reformers. ^he^Jn^lydMJ!mffi.^LXSHo^_jank£"

  various minority groups. They included many provincial figures, who broiIgTu!«tnTrre!^